Frank Turner: ‘It’s a record about finding my place in the world’

Punk-rock-folk troubadour Frank Turner will release his 10th album Undefeated tomorrow (3 May), a poignant and reflective album offering emotive snapshots from his teenage years through to today, all told through his customary honest and unflinching lens.

‘It’s a record about finding my place in the world,’ he said. ‘I think in lots of ways, I sort of fall between various stools. I mean, I’m not a heritage punk act, like Bad Religion and I say that with all the love and respect. I’m not Gen and the Degenerates, I’m not 22, in a punk band and tearing it up (laughs). It’s my 10th record, which is an unusual number. And, you know, I’m not new to this. It doesn’t have the freshness of a debut album but hopefully it has some of the accumulated weight – I hesitate to use the word wisdom – of many years doing this and nine preceding solo records. I would say the governing emotions of this record are pride, I was going to say quiet pride, but I’m talking to you about it (laughs), so it’s not that quiet! And also a sort of pleasant surprise. Do you know what I mean? It’s still working, I’m still doing this, that’s crazy.’

The 14-track journey that Undefeated takes us on highlights just why Turner is one of the best lyricists of his generation, with his unparalleled ability to tap into our deepest emotions, moving seamlessly from defiance to wistfulness, vulnerability and resilience across the tracks, frequently fusing all of these elements in one song. The opening track ‘Do One’ is an anthem to not tolerating anyone’s bullshit, with him proclaiming: “I’m still standing up and there’s nothing you can do”, a song he describes as ‘me and my band firing on all cylinders’. His message is clear in the opening lines: “Some people are just going to hate you, no matter what you do, so don’t waste your time trying to change their minds, just be a better you.”

‘If you can write something that’s simultaneously very personal and also universal, if you can pull that shit off, then you’ve got a job’

One thing Turner has excelled at over the years, which is equally evident on Undefeated, is dissecting big, complex emotions to make them seem universal and accessible: ‘The first thing I’ll say is that right there is the knack of songwriting,’ he said. ‘In a funny way, it’s a little bit like one of those old magic eye posters from the 90’s, you can’t look at it straight on. If you sit down and try and write a song that’s personal but universal, you end up writing ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams. It’s a very successful song. I’m not knocking it necessarily but to my ears, it sounds like you can see the stitches pretty easily. Therefore, what I have to do and what I’ve done for two decades now, is sit down and write something personal and honest and then you just cross your fingers and hope that anybody else recognises it. In my career, sometimes people do, and that’s a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful for it but I don’t want to spend too much time examining that because I think that there’s a danger there of “killing the frog” by dissecting it.’

‘International Hide and Seek Champions’ is one of the standout tracks on the album, it’s both exhilarating and playful. It’s essentially an ode to grabbing your passport and running away from it all, as he promises his wife in the track that they’ll get “old and fat” and take their cat with them for company. It opens with Turner singing ebulliently: “Darling, do you want to get out of here? I’ve got two parachutes and a caseful of cash, we’ve been trapped in a time of hysteria, I’ve got a hankering to do something rash”. The lyrics are brilliant, frequently funny and heartwarming and the song remains your ear worm long after you’ve heard it, with the sheer energy propelling it along making it a song to remember.

It turns out to have an incredible provenance: ‘In the early 1970’s, there was a guy called D.B. Cooper,’ he said. ‘He hijacked a plane on the West Coast of the United States. He didn’t hurt anybody but he demanded $200,000, which they brought to the plane. The plane took off again and he parachuted out of the back of the plane with the money and was never seen again. In American folklore, he’s the one that got away. He’s become a bit of a Robin Hood figure for a lot of Americans. I was watching a documentary – there’s a documentary on Netflix about him – and obviously that wasn’t his real name but it’s a romantic story right there. Hopefully, he made it to Belize or Antigua or something (laughs). There was a guy in the documentary who had a t-shirt that said “D.B. Cooper, international hide and seek champion” and I thought that was pretty funny. Hence the title and the penultimate line of the song is “D.B. Cooper now in second place”!’ Turner’s cat Boudicat – playfully named after the Queen of the Iceni – also makes her first appearance on this track: ‘My wife and I like the animal name that’s a pun,’ he said laughing.

‘It’s about one of the ways that my anxiety manifests itself, which is in having these kind of endless silent arguments in my mind’

It is testament to his talents as a songwriter that songs such as this can sit so neatly alongside tracks like ‘Ceasefire’, a raw and tormented track in which the intensity with which he shouts “ceasefire” sounds more like gunfire as the song progresses. Early on in the song, the lines: “I know I’m not everything that you had hoped and imagined I would be but I did my best and I have seen things that you don’t even know that you’ve never seen. We need to find some common ground in the ruins that still stand between you and me, both of us want peace, ceasefire…” made me question whether it was written to his father, with whom he had a fractious relationship that led them to being estranged for a decade, although they have since reconnected.

However, ‘Ceasefire’ actually turns out to be an argument between him today and his teenage self: ‘Essentially, it’s about one of the ways that my anxiety manifests itself, which is in having these kind of endless silent arguments in my mind while I’m failing to get to sleep,’ he said. ‘My wife, who is a psychotherapist, asked the obvious but perceptive question of who it is I’m arguing with? This hadn’t really occurred to me before, so I kind of interrogated that and realised that a fair amount of the time it’s with a hypothetical teenage me. When I was 15-16 years old, the world was black and white. I was very angry (laughs). And I knew what the answer was, because I was 15! My ideas were cellophane wrapped, box fresh and all that sort of shit. As you get older, you understand that the world is a grey place, not a black and white place and that things are more complicated. I’ve experienced another 28 years of life, I’ve seen and done many things. I was straight edge when I was a teenager, which means no drinking, or that kind of thing, although I have been to rehab in the intervening years.’

There is a part of his teenage self that still resides within him, mocking him gently: ‘Quite a good example of this actually is on the last album (FTHC, 2022), if you’ll forgive me blowing my own trumpet for a second. We got the Number One in the album charts, me in my 40’s was very stoked about this. It didn’t fall out of the sky, we worked really fucking hard to make that happen and I was very pleased. But when I was a teenager, my self-definition, or a large part of my self-definition, was that I was the kind of person who didn’t like any bands that were in the charts, because “Fuck those mainstream arseholes” (laughs). There was a moment on the day when I got told that we got the Number One and that part of my brain went: “Well, fucking sell out (laughs)”.’

However, Turner has decided that it’s time to leave his teenage self behind, saying ‘I don’t want to sit there justifying myself to a teenager the whole time’: ‘The other side of this, of course – and I talked about this more in my previous record – but I got effectively evicted when I was eight years old (to go to boarding school). I was a pretty hurt kid when I was a teenager, that anger came from a place of alienation and rejection. Now I kind of want to give that kid a hug. Do you know what I mean? I want to tell him it’s going to be all right, I want to tell him that one day you will be friends with Bill Stevenson and Fat Mike.’

‘Record shops were hugely important to me as a kid, both as refuges but also as a place to discover music and to meet other people’

‘Girl From The Record Shop’ on the new album is gloriously nostalgic and will remind anyone who spent their Saturdays in them as a teenager what a fantastic and welcoming refuge they were. It’s another exuberant, insanely catchy offering, which pulls from the 50’s and 60’s but which incorporates elements of his punky hero Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello. Turner calls the track ‘a teenage dream of romance for my inner music nerd’, adding: ‘Record shops were hugely important to me as a kid, both as refuges but also as a place to discover music and to meet other people.’ The song is based on a girl in a record shop he met when he was 14: ‘I didn’t talk to her, I didn’t,’ he said laughing. ‘I was an awkward 14 year old who probably skulked around the listening room way too much, making people feel awkward! Record shops have been very important in my life, they still are.’ I say that I’ve heard that his wife doesn’t like this song and he grins: ‘She doesn’t! She’s like: “Who the fuck is this song about?” (laughs) I mean, with some humour, you know. In fairness, it should be said that I produced my wife’s first album, which was almost exclusively songs about ex-boyfriends of hers, so I was like: “Well, we’re equal now!”‘

As the track kicks off: “I’m in love with the girl from the record shop. Sat behind the counter in her Riot Grrrl top. And every time she looks at me, my heart just stops. I’m in love with the girl from the record shop. I’ve been in every day buying so much vinyl, don’t even know my own turntable. Something in her smile makes me so unstable, oh yeah…”

There are no clichés about the “difficult” 10th album here, which he calls ‘a liberating statement’: ‘At the same time, I have a duty to justify writing and releasing a 10th album, that’s a lot of records for anybody,’ he said. ‘Also, I’m 42, which is not a sexy rock ’n’ roll age! All through my career, I’ve been interested in writers like Loudon Wainwright III or The Hold Steady, people who write about adulthood, essentially.’ Undefeated also marks his first independent record, which he recorded in his new home studio in he and his wife’s home on Mersea Island, Essex: ‘I completed my deal and was offered an extension, which I turned down,’ he said. ‘It’s very nice to be offered more but leaving that world was a choice.’

‘It all began because Ben, who was the drummer in my old band, Million Dead, counted Million Dead shows as we went’

On his website, Turner has a list of every gig he has ever played, which he proudly updates, which strikes me as a brilliant thing to do and is not something I’ve seen elsewhere: ‘It all began because Ben, who was the drummer in my old band, Million Dead (his post hardcore punk band from 2000-2005), counted Million Dead shows as we went,’ he said. ‘At the time, I thought he was weird (laughs), I was like, why? He had a little notepad and used to just make a note of every show that we’d done. When the band broke up in 2005, I was so happy that he had done this because it’s difficult to remember four years of tour. So I started counting my own shows. Another part of the reason for doing it was that for the first three years of my touring career, I was on my own: I didn’t have a tour manager, I didn’t have a band. I took the train a lot. There was nobody I could call and say: “Hey, what do we have in March 2006?!” So I started making a list.’

Over time, it has become something that his fans look out for, which was cemented when he did a benefit in a car park in Shoreditch in London for Strummerville, an organisation that supports music globally as part of The Joe Strummer Foundation (of The Clash). The event marked Turner’s 1,000th gig: ‘By the time I got to show 2,000, which was in 2016 in Nottingham, people had cottoned on,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got into a habit of announcing the show number on stage, there’s a degree of bravado to it!’

In February next year, he will play his 3,000th show at Alexandra Palace in London, something he calls ‘full-fat ludicrous’: ‘Show 1’000 was fun, show 2’000 was crazy, this is just off the charts,’ he said. ‘There will be music, dancing, incredible supports and probably confetti. I’m proud and slightly bemused that I’ve got this far and grateful to everyone who’s been along for the ride.’

‘Sometimes the thing that I’m trying to say is profound and sometimes it isn’t but in this particular instance, it’s one of the most raw things I’ve ever tried to say in a song’

He cites ‘Somewhere Inbetween’ as his favourite track on the album and it’s easy to see why; it encapsulates everything he has felt about life as a musician and other people’s perceptions of him over the years. The sense of not fitting in but trying to, of feeling abandoned, the rawness of the realisation that you’re not sure who you are, as captured beautifully in the opening lines: “I’ve been pretending to be somebody else since I was just 15 and I don’t know if the show was for them or for me anymore. I’m not sure and I don’t recall being born but I remember being underwhelmed when I worked out who I was…”

‘Strands of ‘Ceasefire’ run through ‘Girl From The Record Shop’, ‘East Finchley’ and other songs, particularly ‘Somewhere In Between’, which is the sort of sister song to it,’ he said. ‘You’re not supposed to have favourites but that’s my favourite song on the record. On some level, the act of writing words certainly is the attempt to say exactly what you mean, it sounds simple but it’s not. And I do that with every song that I write. Sometimes it’s a success and sometimes it’s not, sometimes the thing that I’m trying to say is profound and sometimes it isn’t but in this particular instance, it’s one of the most raw things I’ve ever tried to say in a song.’ That comes through clearly – and heartbreakingly – in lines such as: “Something isn’t working, no-one on my side. No sense of where I’m standing, half my fucking life…”

On Saturday (4 May), Turner is taking on a new challenge: he is driving around the country in his Undefeated World Record Attempt, playing in independent record shops and grassroots venues in 15 cities from Liverpool to Southampton, an endeavour which is due to finish at noon on 5 May, in partnership with Music Venue Trust.

‘Quite often we get to venues and I know them better than the people working there because I’ve been playing there for 20 years’

He jokingly refers to it as ‘one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had’: ‘In 2009, I played 24 shows in 24 hours, first of all, they were all in London,’ he said. ‘Secondly, I was 15 years younger and thirdly, I was powered largely by upper drugs at that point in my life, so it was easier to do (laughs). Those three things are no longer true! I think I survived. I looked up who had the record and it’s an American singer who did it in a helicopter, which strikes me as cheating (laughs). But this is very typical of how my life works. I had the idea, I sat down and planned the bare bones of it with my tour manager, we had fun, we bought a roadmap for the UK, a paper one, and got a set of different coloured pens and started drawing lines, discussing the M62 on a Saturday afternoon (laughs). And then my crew went off and organised the logistics, which they do very well.’

For someone who has played up and down the country, as well as abroad, both in independent record stores and grassroots venues, it is clear that they are still very dear to his heart: ‘It’s very important to me that every show is an independent music venue, sponsored by the MBT, and every show is ticketed by an independent local record store,’ he said. ‘We have lots of local acts opening the shows. This week, I’ve been doing tons of interviews with people who go: “What the fuck are you doing?!” And “How will you survive this?” And that’s the moment when I, for the first time, started going: “Oh, no, what have I done (laughs)?” I’ve been thinking about this slightly more analytically this week and I think that the hard part is going to be the journeys between the shows. Once I’m on stage, I’m fine – happy days – that’s not a problem for me. It’s the bit when it’s an hour’s drive from Chesterfield to somewhere else at two o’clock in the morning! I’ve got a feeling that I’ll finish the last show, I’ll feel great for about half an hour, and then I’m just going to go (he mimes collapsing)!’

In an industry not known for its longevity, he is a veteran, somebody who was touring way before any of the new bands on the scene even came along: ‘Quite often we get to venues and I know them better than the people working there because I’ve been playing there for 20 years.’ He also has a history of pulling off the near-impossible: he celebrated 2022’s FTHC album with an American tour that was epic even by his standards: he and his band The Sleeping Souls did 50 states in 50 days, complete with new drummer Callum Green, Ben Lloyd (guitar), Tarrant Anderson (bass) and Matt Nasir (piano).

‘What, if any, is the role for a 42 year old trying to make punk rock music? Coming up, I wasn’t ever really quite part of one scene or another’

As a musician and songwriter who has consistently challenged himself, he is acutely aware that he is a difficult person for the industry to pigeonhole: ‘What, if any, is the role for a 42 year old trying to make punk rock music? Coming up, I wasn’t ever really quite part of one scene or another,’ he said. ‘I was around the edge of them but I was always just there on my own. Sometimes that sucked, sometimes you just had to plow forwards. Sometimes I wonder which round of revival reunion shows is going to sweep me up (laughs) and the answer is probably none of them, but then I’m still going, so fuck it!’

He started off playing the piano as a child before teaching himself to play the guitar at the age of 11. He ramped up his interest in music after seeing an Iron Maiden poster on a friend’s bedroom wall when they were playing Warhammer, persuading his parents to buy him their album Killers and, later on, a guitar.

‘Letters’ is another of the hard hitters on Undefeated and is about a childhood friend he has since lost touch with; there’s a real nostalgia but sense of understanding to it, with Turner citing the key line: “Both of us know it wasn’t love in the end, you were more of a teacher, a distant best friend.” As he explains: ‘I went on a camping holiday to Cornwall when I was a kid and I met a girl there, who was more into underground punk rock than I was. I had just begun my journey into the very edge, top froth of punk rock – I knew who The Sex Pistols and Green Day were. And she, in the way that only teenagers can, slightly scoffed at me (laughs). We became pen friends, as people did in the 90’s. There were adolescent declarations of romance and all this kind of thing involved. She sent me endless mixtapes of stuff like Dead Kennedys and Operation Ivy and Pennywise and all these great people. There was a line where she was explaining to me who Tim Armstrong is (the singer/guitarist from Rancid) and now he’s a friend of mine, so that was an odd moment of recognition. I can’t really remember what happened. I don’t think it petered out, it stopped quite abruptly, we lost touch. Maybe she moved?’

‘There was a sincerity that was quite moving to me to read back on and to remember when the world was that crisp’

He admits that there’s ‘a little bit of artistic license going on there, there is a line between honest songwriting and just kind of reportage’. Nonetheless, the song might never have come about without the pandemic: ‘I’m a document hoarder,’ he said laughing. ‘I have every fucking piece of paper I’ve ever received in my life in a box somewhere, and they’re labelled by year. I think of them as my impending midlife crisis! During the pandemic, when there was nothing else to do, I started having a flip through. It’s always an interesting moment because you realise that everyone’s a little bit Stalinist about their own personal history. You read stuff you wrote at the time, and you’re like: “Oh, fuck” (laughs).’

However, when he read the letters he’d received back and could piece together former conversations they’d had, he discovered something else, too: ‘For all the cocksure, headstrong, arrogance of being a teenager, there was also a kind of purity to it that I’m not sure I want to say is admirable but it’s certainly touching,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I mean? There was a sincerity that was quite moving to me to read back on and to remember when the world was that crisp. That experience of rediscovery was where the song was born.’

The title track and closer ‘Undefeated’ sums up everything that the album is trying to say: it’s vulnerable, incredibly poignant, unflinching and quietly defiant. It’s impossible not to have a visceral reaction to it, such is the extent to which he lays himself bare, yet despite everything he has encountered along the way he is, indeed, still undefeated. At the beginning, you think it’s going to be the most pared back song on the album, with just his vocals and haunting, almost church-like, piano line but the strings come in majestically around halfway through as it builds to a rousing and sweeping orchestral outro. It almost feels like a swan song, although he is clearly far too young for that: ‘There’s lots to talk about with that song,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Musically, I wrote the song on piano, which is unusual for me and, put it this way, I’m not very good at piano (laughs). The fourth chord of the song is a really quite weird jazz suspended chord because I don’t know what I’m doing! I hit it by accident and went: “Oh, that’s pretty cool”. I then took it to Matt, who plays piano in my band, who’s a world-class pianist. And I was like: “Can you do it like this only better?!”‘

‘You can say to Matt jokingly: “What’s the name of the actor who played the third gunman in the final scene of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’?” And he’ll know!’

As the track opens: “Stood in the middle of life, love and loss, no longer bulletproof, no longer young. Surfing the ripples of pride and remorse. The glory’s fading, the kids are all gone.”

Nasir has an obsession that also greatly influenced the title track: ‘The other thing about Matt is that his major obsession in life is James Bond,’ Turner said laughing. ‘Is it John Barry, who wrote all the James Bond? I swear to God, you can say to Matt jokingly: “What’s the name of the actor who played the third gunman in the final scene of ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’?” And he’ll know! I said to him that I was thinking that maybe we could have a Bond theme ending for this song. And he said: “I thought you’d never ask, leave it with me, motherfucker!”‘

Turner acknowledges that songwriting can be a blast or painstakingly hard: ‘Writing lyrics is a thing I do all the time, sometimes it’s quite free-flowing and comes quickly,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s agonising (laughs), and there’s usually a mix of both in any given song. To pick an example, “the truth is I’m useless at opening up” line from ‘Letters’, that was the first draft that just popped out of my head. And I thought: “Oh, that’s pretty good, I’ll keep that.” But with ‘Undefeated’, I knew it had to be precise, lyrically, syllable by syllable.’

‘I like that kind of potential intertextuality’

Literary influences have also seeped into ‘Undefeated’, particularly from Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez and Australian critic, journalist and broadcaster who lived in the UK from 1962 until his death in 2019, Clive James: ‘There’s a wonderful essay by Clive James, who’s one of my favourite writers,’ he said. ‘He talked about getting older and just being proud that you behaved no worse and grateful that you’ve made it, that’s where that line comes from. ‘Be More Kind’ from the album of the same name (2018) is a Clive James quote as well. So I have full form here! There’s a wonderful book by Gabriel García Márquez called ‘The Autumn of The Patriarch’, that’s where the line “autumn in the wilderness can be the prettiest time of year” comes from. I like that kind of potential intertextuality.’

Ultimately, Turner had an endearing goal with the closing track: ‘The central motif for that song was an attempt to write my own version of ‘My Way’ because I’ve definitely reached that age where I sit in the dark, late in the evening, swilling a whisky and shedding a tear as I listen to Frank (Sinatra) say it how it fucking is,’ he said laughing. ‘I think that it’s a natural part of the particularly male life cycle! It is the most stereotypically middle-aged man funeral song ever but for good reason, which is that it’s brilliant! I don’t consider myself to be at the end of anything but I’m certainly quite far down a certain line. And there is a moment there for reflection and that’s what the song is. That’s kind of what the album is, too, which is why it’s the last song on the album.’

If he could go for a pint with anyone, he picks Nick Cave: ‘I’m extremely engaged with Nick Cave as a writer because he’s such a diverse writer,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I love the kind of borderline noise, insane art rock of both The Birthday Party (Cave’s Australian post-punk band from 1977 to 1983) and his first four solo records. I think Ghosteen (2019) is just unfathomably brilliant, I think it’s one of the most staggeringly beautiful pieces of art that I’ve ever encountered in my life. It gives me chills to even think about. The only real other person that I hold in this regard is Leonard Cohen. It’s almost hard to be influenced by them because they’re too fucking good!’

Turner got to meet Cave somewhat serendipitously when he was recording his own first album: ‘It was just in passing, he popped his head around the door, he was so nice,’ he said. He said: “Good luck, I hope it goes well” and I said, well, I didn’t say anything, I just stood there with my mouth open! On some level, I’d have a million technical questions for him but I’d also like to know how he holds himself in public. He has a bulletproof quality that I envy, I’m not fucking bulletproof (laughs). My question to him would be: “What’s your secret?” He does his Red Hand Files thing in recent years where he sends out weekly emails answering questions to fans. If I sent that question in – maybe I’ll do it after this – he might answer it!’

(Photo credit: Shannon Shumaker.)